What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy (2 page)

“What I need you to do,” he said, “is just shut the fuck up and sit there and keep your eyes open. Till I tell you to do something else, that’s
all
I need you to do.”

He hauled the beast down Jefferson towards Washington Bottoms, over a spectacular collection of potholes and into what appeared to be either a long-abandoned warehouse district or the set for some postwar science fiction epic. We pulled up alongside the only visible life-forms hereabouts, all of them hovering about a Spur station advertising “Best Barbecue.” A four-floor apartment house across the street had fallen into itself and a young woman sat on the curb outside staring at her shoes, strings of saliva snailing slowly down a black T-shirt reading
ATEFUL DE D
. A huge rotting wooden tooth hung outside the one-time dentist’s office to the right. The empty lot to the left had grown a fine crop of treadbare auto tires, bags of garbage, bits and pieces of shopping carts, bicycles and plastic coolers, jagged chunks of brick and cinder block.

Nabors had the special on a kaiser roll, Fritos and a 20-ounce coffee. I copied the coffee, passed on the rest. Hell, I could live for a week off what he spilled down his shirtfront. But that day his shirt was destined to stay clean a while longer, because, once we’d settled back in the squad and he started unwrapping, we got a call. Disturbance of the peace, Magnolia Arms, apartment 24.

He drove us twelve blocks to a place that looked pretty much like the one we’d left.

“Gotta be your first DP, right?”

I nodded.

“Shit.” He looked down at his wrapped barbeque. Grease crept out slowly onto the dash. “You sit here. Anything looks out of whack, you hear anything, you call in Officer Needs Assistance. Don’t think about it, don’t try to figure it out, just hit the fuckin’ button. You got that?”

“Gee, I’m not sure, Cap’n. You know how I is.”

Nabors rolled his eyes. “What the fuck’d I do? Just what the fuck’d I do?”

Opening the door, he pulled himself out and struggled up plank-and-pipe stairs. I watched him make his way along the second tier. Intent, focused. I reached over and got his fucking sandwich and threw it out the window. He knocked at 24. Stood there a moment talking, then went in. The door closed.

The door closed, and nothing else happened. There were lights on inside. Nothing else happened for a long time. I got out of the squad, went around to the back. Following some revisionist ordinance, a cheap, ill-fitting fire escape had been tacked on. I pulled at the rung, saw landings go swaying above, bolts about to let go. Started up, thinking about all those movies with suspension bridges.

I’d made it to the window of 24 and was reaching to try it when a gunshot brought me around. I kicked the window in and went after it.

Through the bathroom door I saw Nabors on the floor. No idea how badly he might have been hurt. Gun dangling, a young Hispanic stood over him. He looked up at me, nose running, eyes blank as two halves of a pecan shell. Like guys too long in country that had just shut down, because that was the only way they could make it.

I shot him.

It all happened in maybe twenty seconds, and for years afterward, in memory, I’d count it out, one thousand, two thousand. . . . At the time, it seemed to go on forever, especially that last moment, with him sitting there slumped against the wall and me standing with my S&W .38 still extended. Right hand only, not the officially taught and approved grip, never sighting but firing by instinct, how I’d learned to shoot back home and the only way that ever worked for me.

I’d hit him an inch or so off the center of his chest. For a moment as I bent above him, there was a whistling sound and frothy blood bubbling up out of the amazingly small wound, before everything stopped. He had three crucifixes looped around his neck, a tattoo of barbed wire beneath.

Nabors lay there lamenting the loss of his barbeque. Man like him, that’s the note he should go out on. But he wasn’t going out, not this time. I picked up the phone and called in Officer Down and location. Only then did it occur to me that I hadn’t cleared the rest of the apartment.

Not much rest to clear, as it happened. A reeking bathroom, a hallway with indoor-outdoor carpeting frayed like buckskin at the edges. Boxes sat everywhere, most of them unpacked, others torn open and dug through, contents spilling half out. The girl was in the back bedroom, in a closet, arms lashed to the crossbar, feet looped about with clothesline threaded into stacked cinder blocks. Her breasts hung sadly, blood trickled down her thighs, and her eyes were bright. She was fourteen.

Chapter Three

“I’M IN OVER MY HEAD
,” Sheriff Bates said. “You came up around here, right?”

“Close enough.”

“Then you know how it is.”

We were in his Jeep, heading back towards town. Dirt roads pitted as a teenager’s face. Now we turned out of the trees onto worn blacktop. The radio mounted beneath his dash crackled.

“Weekends, we break up bar fights, haul in drunk drivers. Maybe kids pay someone to buy them a case of beer and party till they get to be a nuisance, or some guy down on his luck climbs in a window and comes back out with a pillowcase full of flatware, prescription drugs, a laptop or TV. Not like there’s much anywhere he can
go
with it. Once in a blue moon a husband slaps his wife down once too often, gets a butcher knife planted in his shoulder or a frypan laid up alongside his head.”

The radio crackled again. Didn’t sound to me any different from previous crackles, but Bates picked up the mike. “I’m on my way in.”

“Ten-four.” Guy at the other end loved those vowels, rolled them around in his mouth like marbles.

Bates hung the mike back on its stirrup.

“Don Lee. You’ll be meeting him here shortly. Eager to get home to his six-pack and his new wife, most likely in that order. What time’s it got to be, anyway?”

“Little after eight.”

“My month to cover nights. Natural order of things, Don Lee’d be gone hours ago. Lisa’d have had his meat and potatoes on the table, he’d be on the couch and his second beer while she washed up. But long as I’m out of pocket, he’s stuck there.”

Bates hauled the Jeep hard right and we skidded out onto what passes for a highway around here, picking up speed. Almost immediately, though, he geared down, braked.

“You need help there, Ida?”

A saddle-oxord Buick, cream over blue, vintage circa ’48, sat steaming in the right lane. An elderly woman all in white, vintage a couple of decades prior, stood alongside. She wore a hat that made you want to hide Easter eggs in it.

“Course not. Just have to let it cool down, same as always.”

“I figured. You say hi to Karl for me, now.”

“I’ll say it. What he hears . . .”

A mile or so further along, the sheriff said, “Back in Memphis you had the highest clearance rate on homicides of anyone on the force.”

“You’ve done your homework.”

“I’m not in a habit of drafting help. Tend to be cautious about it.”

“Then you know it wasn’t me, it was us. What part wasn’t plain luck owes mostly to my partner. I’d be jumping hoops of intuition, flying high. Meanwhile he was back down there on the ground thinking things methodically through.”

“That would be Randy—right?”

I nodded.

“Like I said, I’m in over my head. Expertise, luck, intuition—we’ll take whatever you’ve got.”

We came in from the north, onto deserted streets. Pop. 1280, a sign said. Passed Jay’s Diner with its scatter of cars and trucks outside, drugstore and hardware store gone dark, A&P, Dollar Store, Baptist church, Gulf station. Pulled in behind city hall. One-story prefab painted gray. Probably took them all of a week to put it up, and it’d be there forever, long as the glue held. The paint job was recent and hurried, with a light frosting of gray on bushes alongside. A single black-and-white sat nosed in close outside. Inside, a rangy man in polyester doing its best to look like khaki sat nosed close to the desk. On it were a radio, a ten-year-old Apple computer and a stack of magazines, one of which he was paging through. He looked up as we came in. Wet brown eyes that reminded me of spaniels, ruddy face narrow and shallow like a shovel, thin hair. Something electric about him, though. Sparks and small connections jumping around in there unremarked.

“Anything going on?” Bates said.

“ ’Bout what you’d expect. Couple of minor accidents at getting-off time. Old Lady Siler reported her purse stolen, then remembered she’d locked it in the trunk of her car. I ran the spare key out, as usual. Jimmy Allen showed up at his wife’s house around dark and started pounding on the door. Then he tried to steal the car. When I got there, he had two wires pulled down out of the radio, trying to hotwire them.”

“Been at it for an hour or more, if I know Jimmy.”

“Prob’ly so.”

“He in back?”

“Out flat.”

“This goes on, Jimmy might as well just start having his mail delivered here.”

Bates walked over and closed three of the four light switches on the panel by the door. Much of the room fell gray, leaving us and desk in a pool of dim light outside which shadows jumped and slid.

“Don Lee, this’s Mr. Turner.”

The deputy held out a hard, lean hand and I took it. A good handshake, no show to it, just what it was. Like the man, I suspected.

“Pleased to have you, Detective.”

“Just Turner. I haven’t been a detective for a long time.”

“Hope you’re not telling us you forget how,” Bates said.

“No. What happens is, you stop believing it matters.”

“And does it?” This from Don Lee.

“Does it matter, or does it stop?”

“There’s a difference?”

In that instant I knew I liked him. Liked them both. All I’d wanted was to be left alone, and I’d taken giant steps to ensure that. Rarely strayed far from the cabin, had goods delivered monthly. The last thing I’d wanted was ever again to be part of an investigation, to have to go rummaging through other people’s lives, messes and misdemeanors, other people’s madnesses, other people’s minds.

“Why don’t you fill me in?” I said.

“You’n go on home,” Bates told his deputy. “Appreciate your holding down the fort. Dinner must be getting colder by the minute.”

“All the same to you, I’d as soon stay,” Don Lee said.

Chapter Four

NABORS MADE IT
, survived the shooting that is, but he never came back on active duty. Mondays, my day off, I visited him at the rehab facility out in Whitehaven. Sculptured, impossibly green lawns with sprinklers that went off like miniature Old Faithfuls, squat ugly buildings. Never did figure what those were made of, but they put me in mind of Legos. Soft-handed young doctors and platoons of coiffured, elegantly eyelashed young nurses manning the pressure locks, all of them with mouthfuls of comfort like mush for both visitors and patients, couldn’t spit out those lumps of good advice fast enough.

Suddenly around the station house everyone knew who I was. Older cops who’d pointedly ignored me before, smelling as they often did of sweat socks, stale bourbon or beer, aftershave and last night’s whore, now nodded to me in the locker room. Two shifts in a row I got put in a squad that didn’t haul hard left or need new tires and assigned uptown. Really knew I was some kind of made man the day Fishbelly Joe, the blind albino who’d run a hot dog stand outside the station house as long as anyone could remember, refused my money.

Then one Monday afternoon as I reported for the 3–11, word surfaced from the Captain. Come see him.

“I think it’s a mistake, Turner,” he said. “You’re not ready for it. But you’re bumped to detective.”

I’d been a cop, what, two or three months at that point? Most of the men I worked with were ten, twenty years older, and most of them had packed their lives into the work. Little wonder they’d been reluctant to accept me, and only began to do so, haltingly, now.

Did I for even a moment recognize this as a repeat of what happened in the service? No. (But how could I not have?) There I’d passed from basic training to special forces in a matter of weeks, as in one of those TV shows where events stumble over one another trying to get past. I’m a quick study, have a quirky mind that gets on to things instantly. While others are still floundering and doing belly flops, I’m walking around, looking good—but my understanding never extends far beneath the surface.

At that time, remember, I had little enough training to speak of, and almost no experience. And the fact that Nabors and I had violated procedure was something I just couldn’t get my head around. That went on every moment of every shift of every day, sure. No one did things by the book. You cut corners, jury-rigged, improvised, faked it, got by. But few of those shortcuts ended up with a fatal shooting and a seasoned officer going down. I kept ticking off the mistakes in my head.

We were supposed to stay together at all times. We should both have responded.

When I began to suspect that something had gone badly south, I’d started in without calling for backup.

I’d failed to follow my senior partner’s orders.